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What's the content of your dashboard? Do you intend to use the dashboard icon without text?
–
PhilMay 21 '11 at 12:32

5 Answers
5

Instead of starting with a cockpit or car dashboard metaphor, my choice would be to begin with something that is actually in the dashboard (or at least I assume is in your dashboard): namely, a graph or chart.

A dashboard could represent both momentarily values or statistical data over time. When you look at a dashboard representing web traffic (like Google Analytics) you are often interested in statistical data of last month, last week or last day. Thus Google Analaytics dashboard icon is a graph.

However, if you were to present instant values (such as your current car speed) the meter is preferred. You need to decide which kind of dashboard you have, in order to have the right representation.

One icon that does not look like a clock, but more like a meter would be this one:

Another take is, if you have a series of measures that are either "good" or "bad," then use a series of traffic lights. Starting there, an operator can see what the red items are, and drill further if needed.

Stealing an extract from Benny's answer and your original image - rather than showing the complete dial, you can just focus in on a key part. Here we're using a 64x64 pixel extract. The second extract is from the Tango dashboard.

...... ........ ......

And here's the full Tango dashboard icon from which the second extract is taken:

.............

My view is that it doesn't shrink below 64 pixels in height well, but the extract is usable at 48x48.

Is this a data based dashboard? If is not, the cockpit metric icons are misleading would probably be better a checklist icons (some dots with some lines)...
if is a data dashboard then try to make an icon that is related to the content of the dashboard